


Sugar, Spice and ...

by natacup82



Category: Revenge (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:07:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natacup82/pseuds/natacup82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Baking and revenge are all about the formula. The butter and sugar are the foundation of your vengeance</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugar, Spice and ...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soo/gifts).



> Inspired by this interaction on twitter: _“But who learns a lesson when we bake?” “It’s not about anyone suffering, it’s about cookies.” “I don’t understand.”_ , I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> I started writing this before the show introduced that girl with no self preservation instincts who bakes.

Emily finds Margaret Huntingdon running a high end bakery in Manhattan. A bakery frequented by a variety of rich customers connected to the Grayson’s. 

“So what exactly did this woman have to do with your father’s case?” Nolan asks, browsing through the gallery of elaborate wedding cakes on the _Hunting Sweets_ website. 

Emily smiles, “She was the associate director of Finance at Grayson Global and she testified that there was an internal financial trail leading from my father to the terrorists that brought down Flight 197.”

Nolan tilts his head looking at one of her creations and says, “Maybe she was on an extended sugar high and got confused, these cakes are absurd.”

“Good, I’m planning on hiring her to design my wedding cake. Daniel’s busy, how do you feel about going tasting?” Emily asks.

Nolan smiles, “Who am I to turn down free cake?”

*  
 _Hunting Sweets_ is more twee than Emily expected from a former employee of Grayson Global. The interior is pale pink with bright white accents, the tables purposefully mismatched in various shades of pink and white. 

“I’m all for a bit of color on color,” Nolan says adjusting the collars of his candy apple green on lime green on camo green plaid shirts, “but this is extreme.” He looks around in disgust. “Maybe this woman has been punished enough.”

Emily whispers, “Bad taste isn’t a punishment for what she did to my father,” and then she smiles spotting her target coming out from behind the counter. 

“Miss Thorne?” the woman says removing an apron from around her waist, “I’m Margaret Huntingdon, and I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet you in person.”

Emily smiles and says, “The pleasure is all mine,” she gestures to Nolan, “This is my dear friend Nolan Ross. My fiancé couldn’t get away from work and Nolan kindly agreed to come along.”

“Anything for a friend and free cake,” Nolan says with a wave.

Margaret smiles, “It’s a pleasure to have you both. I’ve prepared a variety of samples and a few sketches on design if you’ll just follow me?” 

“Can’t wait,” Emily says and they follow her back to a little room off to the side. 

*

Emily spends two weeks looking at cake designs and tasting flavor combinations and getting no closer to a way to take down Margaret Huntingdon. 

There is nothing on her. Even her Grayson Global severance package was standard; there is not one remarkable thing about her. 

And her cakes are dry, bland and boring. The only exciting thing about her bakery is the decorations and those are all fondant and taste disgusting. 

“How is she still in business?” Emily asks, scrolling through a long line of mediocre reviews. 

Nolan shrugs, “Have you tried everything on the menu? Maybe she’s moving tons of pies while all of these reviewers focus on the awful cake.”

Emily snorts, “There is not one wholly positive review on record for that place-” Emily stops cutting herself off, “I take that back, here’s one.”

“What’s it for?” Nolan asks leaning closer. 

“Mexican wedding cookies?” Emily says squinting at the screen. “But the way this is written is very weird.”

Nolan pulls the laptop toward him and says, “Weird how?” and then he starts reading and raises an eyebrow. “Are they serious?” Nolan says before reading out loud, 

_a dreamy nutty cookie in a cloud of powdered sugar, ask for Aunt Nora’s favorite_

“It’s got to be a fake review or a plant to drive business to the shop.” Emily says, frowning at the screen. 

Nolan hmms, repeats the line and says, “Maybe or maybe it’s a clue for how you can take her down.”

*  
“I don’t understand how learning to bake can help me,” Emily says glaring around the kitchen. 

 

“Well, I’m not going to let you keep passing off my efforts as your own,” Nolan says pulling flour and sugar out of a cabinet and stacking it on the counter. “Nobody deserves to have their own blueberry muffins re-gifted by Victoria Grayson.”

Emily rolls her eyes and says, “Yes, because obviously Victoria being tacky means that I should learn to bake? I need a way to expose her side business selling coke, this won’t help me.”

Nolan laughs, “That’s because you’ve been too focused on violent take downs. You need to think beyond that, look at it like a science problem.”

Emily rolls her eyes, “Baking is not science, its art.” She’s really beginning to regret agreeing to come over. But with Daniel living in the South Fork Inn and Conrad at home, well and at his most disgusting best she needs to regroup. The Grayson’s won’t fall in time for her wedding and if she can’t get Daniel to behave there won’t be a wedding. 

“And that’s where you’re wrong,” Nolan says walking around the island. “With cooking sometimes you can be off on your spices, you can throw something in just to see what happens and not screw everything you’ve been working on. But baking doesn’t work like that.”

Emily gestures at him and Nolan plugs in his mixer.

*

“Baking and revenge are all about the formula. The butter and sugar are the foundation of your vengeance, the identity change that turned poor little Amanda Clarke into calm, cool and cold Emily Thorne.” 

He adds the butter and sugar to bowl and turns on the mixer. Nolan sifts the flour, salt and baking powder into a bowl and sets it aside. 

“The egg is the first step to binding it all together,” Nolan says, cracking an egg into butter and sugar mixture. He pauses, “So it’s sort of like when you bought the house. As long as you’re the girl next door you have a connection to the Grayson’s.” 

Nolan adds vanilla and says, “This is the flavor your last scheme was sorely missing.”

Emily glares, “This analogy is reaching, even for you.”

Nolan smiles. “This analogy is perfect and at the end you get cookies. The flour is the path you’ve laid out for your enemies,” Nolan says adding half of the flour to the bowl. 

Emily smiles, “Is this where you tell me I need to have a clearer path?”

“I wasn’t going to _say_ it but it was implied,” Nolan says adding the other half of the flour. 

He lets it mix until just combined and then turns off the mixer, “And this is where we add in chaos and make it our own. Sometimes that means seducing a long lost grifter son, sometimes that means stirring in chocolate chips, etcetera, etcetera.”

Emily smiles and says, “And sometimes that means crying about my fiancé having cold feet while ordering a dozen of Aunt Nora’s favorite cookies and throwing bricks through the front window.”

“So if a concerned citizen calls the police and they find that she’s been cooking something other than cakes in that kitchen, everybody wins.” Nolan says, and then he laughs and adds, “Well not her.” 

He adds in some oats and starts spooning cookie dough out onto a sheet pan.

Nolan opens the oven door, slides in the cookie sheet and says, “Now we let it bake and at the end-”

“At the end we’ll have fresh, hot revenge,” Emily says, looking at Nolan, “delicious.”


End file.
